The Nifong Disbarment

Mike Nifong, the prosecutor of the Duke lacrosse scandal, is in the news for being disbarred for his handling of the prosecution of the Duke lacrosse team. This illustrates the difference in how concealment of material information is treated in most walks of life and the failure of the IPCC to see any moral dilemma in its role in actively concealing the adverse post-1960 results of the Briffa et al reconstruction. The IPCC authors’ response to criticism of the deletion was only that it would be “inappropriate” to show the adverse post-1960 results. Surely it’s “inappropriate” not to show them.

There’s another amusing connection. Tom Crowley, a key member of the Hockey Team, who acted as Michael Mann’s stunt double at the scheduled House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing last summer (Mann sending a lawyer’s letter to the great amusement of the Republicans), prominently supported the now disbarred prosecutor. Here are a couple of amusing blog articles on Crowley here and here . Like the IPCC, Crowley seemed to see no problem with misconduct if it’s in a “good cause”.

Update – as noted by a poster below, Crowley retracted his comments shortly after making them, stating:

On Nov. 13, The Herald-Sun published an “Other Voices” piece by me concerning the Duke lacrosse case. I have subsequently been informed of errors in that letter. In particular my blanket statement about behavior of the lacrosse team was neither fair in general nor applicable to the particular case now in dispute. I apologize for this and any other errors.

The response to my letter has made me more aware of the intense emotions that are associated with this case. These tensions can only be bad for campus-community relations, and I strongly support any efforts to reduce them. Finally, I sincerely hope that lessons learned from the lacrosse case will be applied to future cases in order to lift the standards of justice for all in Durham County.

Usually, it’s prudent to try to get your facts right before making allegations.

Update: Just to be clear, I’ve met Crowley; we sat beside each other at the first House hearings and then I went out for beer afterwards with him and Myron Ebell and others – my mother would have approved of the diplomacy involved in getting this group together – and had a nice chat with him.

Our emails back and forth have been cheerful although ridiculously unproductive. He likes basketball which increases his standing immeasurably in my books. I mentioned a long time ago that I thought his text Crowley and North was very interesting and better than Bradley’s book.

He’s written some non-hockey stick articles which are pretty interesting. I’ve been meaning to post up some of his comments on lapse rate. However, he wrote an article in EOS in 2005 slagging me in which, like his letter on the lacrosse team, one fact after another was wrong. Nanne Weber of KNMI started off with a very unfavorable impression of me due to this article. I submitted a reply to EOS which they took 6 months to review and then rejected as being no longer topical, although the reviewer agreed that I had legitimate grievances with the Crowley article. I asked for a retraction and got nowhere.

Perhaps, in the spirit of reconciliation of Crowley’s retraction here, he might turn his mind to a similar retraction of his EOS article.

Under what logic is it inappropriate to show adverse results. I would imaging that it would only strengthen a study to do so and explain why or how the adverse data shows up. Then again if it shoots a hole in your boat, I can see why you wouldn’t want to use it. But, any grad student who hide results like that would not graduate.

Here’s as far as I could get of what Tom Crowley wrote (without spending money to get the full 541 words):

Herald-Sun, The (Durham, NC) – November 12, 2006

Don’t be too quick to toss lacrosse case

I am surprised at the number of letter writers to your paper who, although they have no legal qualifications, seem to assume they have sufficient knowledge about the Duke lacrosse case to conclude that the case should be thrown out before it even goes to trial. I don’t know what happened that night with respect to those students and that woman, but I do know the following items about the case that would lead one to hesitate before throwing out the case. The Duke lacrosse players…

While ignoring the mountain of evidence that does exist, Crowley seemed particularly excised about evidence that does not. “Why,” he asked Herald-Sun readers, “are photographs available before and after the alleged event, but not during it?”

Crowley has the scientific expertise: I do not. But it’s my understanding that laws of space, time, and motion make it difficult to photograph an “alleged event.” If an “event” didn’t occur, it’s hard to see how anyone could photograph it.

I’m a lawyer and have posted a little back and forth with Steve once before on this topic before in blog reply comments.

The criminal disclosure analog is an interesting one. The prosecutor has a duty to proactively disclose pertinent information to the defense.

An even better example, with more glaring differences with the IPCC, et al., are the civil discovery rules. Even in simple slip and fall cases, every single document and piece of information requested that is relevant or even may just “lead to the discovery of admissible evidence” must be produced. This is Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Rule 26 if you’re interested in googling it.

For technical experts even in these simple civil cases, this includes every scrap of data used in its original file format, all code used to process it and all information reviewed by the expert. Moreover, long multi-day depositions can be taken of the expert going through step-by-step every single step he took and decision he made.

Not only are opposing experts’ methods rendered entirely replicable immediately, but often, multiple iterations of replications with variations are performed by both parties. And these occur many times even in very small cases.

For the billion+ dollar trade secret, antitrust and securities cases I’ve worked on, there are countless different experts, and the analysis by other experts themselves of literally terrabytes of data can run way up over $10 million. Moreover, depositions of a single expert can go on for over a week.

The global warming issue could potentially be a $100+ trillion question over the next several decades. That even less open discovery is taking place for it than a $50,000 slip and fall case is absolutely beyond shocking.